Discovering Coolidge (part one)

In my last post I posed the question: how did I discover and engage with Clark Coolidge's poetry in the first place? Every reader will have her own story to tell in this regard; here's my story. As is I suspect the case for most English Majors graduating from U.S. undergraduate programs in the early 1990s--and perhaps still today? more preservers of tradition than innovators, universities and their English departments in particular are notoriously inept at addressing the contemporary--Anglo-American poetry in my formal education ended with Pound and Eliot. (Gertrude Stein I had to discover on my own, though my own avant-garde eanings in the late 1980s also led me to Kerouac, Burroughs and Artaud). I knew names of some contemporary poets and has some familiarity with the Beats (a hardbound copy Ginsberg's collected poems was one of the first poetry books I ever bought, at the Strand on some early trip to New York City), but I had no way of orienting others: no sense of distinguishing an Ashbery from a Hollander, a Creeley from a Lowell, let alone connecting them up to the present moment.

In beginning my graduate studies in the mid-1990s, it was in the context of studying postmodern literature and theory that I first engaged with Charles Olson's work, as well as, in the midst of Fredric Jameson's now classic theories of postemodernism, a curious little poem called “China” by Bob Perelman. I remember throughly enjoying the discussion we had in class about what kinds of speakers could offer these seemingly disconnected bits of observation and experience, though my full initiation into what was being called “Language Poetry” would take place a year or so later, upon hearing Charles Bernstein read his poetry at the 20th Century Literature Conference in Louisville in 1994. I enjoyed the sound-and-sense play of his work: it reminded me less of any “poetry” I knew and more of Captain Beefheart. Back home, I checked out and devoured with great relish Dark City, the newest Bernstein collection at my university library.

As is my inclination, when I find something of interest I read everything I can find about it; this “language poetry” seemed to be something that connected up in the present moment back to the great Modernists I knew (Pound and Stein; someone named Zukofsky was completely unfamiliar to me), creating a living tradition in the wake of what my academic training lacked (or more likely willfully ignored). And the more I read about “language poetry,” the more the name Clark Coolidge kept appearing. Clearly he warrented investigation.

At some point in the next few years (mid-1990s) I picked up his book Solution Passage: Poems 1978-1981, a dense book of poems for such a short span of years through which I did not immediately find a clear way. In December 1997, I took a trip to Toronto to do dissertation research (on my first and soon to be abandoned topic), visit friends and see the city, reporting in an email to my friend Logan Esdale that I had found a copy of Barrett Watten's essay collection Total Syntax at a used bookstore in Toronto. Watten's discussion of Coolidge's poetry was a revelation for me, especially for the passages from the early poems he included. I had been hearing and reading how key the “early Coolidge” was for Language Poetry and yet had never seen these books before and had no immediate way of obtaining them as they were all well out of print at this point. (Remember, this was before Project Eclipse or abebooks.com.)

Clark Coolidge writes of finding in Jack Kerouac's writing "a speed of pick-up on the fly that includes so much, a poet's energies to make of every thought of the world a great ringing edifice," which aptly describes Coolidge's own work as well: an immense body of work with few precedents in modern literature save possibly the attention to the particularity of things in William Carlos Williams, the musicality of language explored by Louis Zukofsky, and the voluminous mind-and-syntax research conducted by Gertrude Stein. Because his poetry tends to defy traditional reading and interpretive strategies, and because the vast majority of his books have been published with small presses in print runs of under 1000 copies (often fewer), Coolidge’s poetry is highly regarded in some circles while remaining virtually unknown in many.

Over the next few months I'll be writing for Jacket2, with a primary focus on Coolidge’s poetry. For over fifty years unabated, Coolidge’s work continues to demonstrate the workings of a “myriad-filled and ceaselessly sending” mind (what he describes finding in Jack Kerouac's work) that reflects, refracts and riffs on the stuff of the world with a singularly sustained attention and momentum that engages and challenges even his most dedicated readers. While his poetry shares affinities with the Beat, Black Mountain and New York school poetries staked out in Donald Allen’s landmark 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, it also explores properties of language other than denotative reference — such as sound, rhythm, texture, and relation — in ways that proved highly generative for the so-called “Language Poets” who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

BIO: I have adjuncted, mostly part-time, in the English and Writing Programs at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College, Vanderbilt University, The George Washington University and Georgetown University since 2000. Upon returning to Cleveland, Ohio during the 2008 recession, my primary creative energies have been spent in the free improv and experimental music scenes: curating and performing in shows widely and in various working contexts and friendships, and hosting the weekly freeform radio program, “The Brewing Luminous,” on WCSB 89.3FM Cleveland, where I am also Jazz Director. Additionally, since 2009 I have helped curate and co-host regular monthly visual art exhibits and poetry events at Brandt Gallery, and with other organizations (SPACES Gallery, CWRU) on a more ad hoc basis.

My most recent critical non-fiction publication, an essay contribution on the reclusive Cleveland octegenarian African American experimental poet Russell Atkins, offers an ecopoetical consideration of the social safety-net for artists in an era of rapid transformation, with suggested future directions (Pleiades Press Unsung Masters Series, 2013). I'm also revising my doctoral dissertation, that I've worked at on-and-off since 2000, into a book-length study of Clark Coolidge's early poetry (1962-1978).

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Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.